Pico CMS

Feb 13, 2020

Over the past few weeks I did some key maintenance to Biting apples, among which was updating the CMS that makes this site run, Pico, to its lates version.

Pico is, as its motto reads, a stupidly simple, blazing fast, flat file CMS.

When I found it almost three years ago, I liked it because it was simple enough to start publishing right away, yet it forced me to learn some CSS, HTML and Twig to personalize the pages at my need - something I had wanted to do for years, but never got a chance to.
Besides being fun, learning some of the web's building languages turned out to be quite useful for some later side projects, namely my wedding's website made with Pico with multilingual versions and some Wordpress websites where I was able to edit the CSS at need.

The reason I chose Pico over some apparently simpler options like more common CMSes, was that I wanted a CMS that was not reliant on databases to run few mere pages, something I could completely tailor at need and, above all, a CMS that would allow me to write posts offline (as I am doing right now) in plain text wherever I was - mostly while commuting to work.
The choice has been valid: the website never had a problem and stayed light; once the foundations were laid down, writing new posts has been very easy. Even if I don't have the variety of plugins Wordpress has to choose from for new features, neither have I experienced absurd problems with it as I am with other WP websites I've worked on and currently have to maintain.

Flat files CMSes are an interesting option for a low budget blog like this: they don't require separate MySQL servers and are light to operate. Pico is one among many, Grav and October are two other very interesting projects looking good.
What I like of Pico as an open source project, is that it is still rather small and with an active development. I myself was able to contribute by localizing it in Italian and whenever I had an issue I could not resolve, support has come quickly and proficiently.

In case you want to start your own website, I'd advice you to look at flat-file CMSes before landing on more common platforms without questioning what your needs are: it might be just easy and a more enriching experience as a whole.

In the end, I think this passage by Andy Miller Grav's lead developer sums it up quite effectively:

There are plenty of great open source CMS platforms out there, including personal favorites Joomla and WordPress, as well as some really promising up-and-coming platforms like PageKit.

All of these platforms rely on a database for data persistence, are powerful, and offer a good degree of flexibility.

One real downside to these platforms is they require a real commitment to learn how to use and develop on them. You really have to pick one out of the pack, and dedicate yourself to that platform if you wish to become competent as either a user, developer, or administrator.

What if there was a platform that was fast, easy-to-learn, and still powerful & flexible?

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